by Michio Kaku
The $10 million set aside for SETI disappeared during the budgeting process. Still, the mere possibility of money had an effect. Since SETI had lost its appropriation, in the early nineties, proposals related to it had rarely been entertained by NASA, and only a small number had been funded. This year, though, the agency offered to hear “observational, theoretical, and archival proposals focused upon the detection of technosignatures,” as part of its Exoplanet Research Program.
American astronomy is a highly organized discipline, with a structured approach to funding. Around every ten years, in a process known as the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, astronomers write papers arguing for new telescopes or robotic missions; they submit their papers to the National Academy of Sciences, where they are reviewed by committees in specialized subfields and then passed on to a central commission of luminaries that, in turn, tells NASA and the National Science Foundation what it should fund. “Astro2010,” the last Decadal Survey report, was 290 pages long and made no substantive mention of SETI. Only a single paper promoting the field, written by Tarter, appeared during the lead-up to it. Earlier this year, Wright and his collaborators—including the planetary scientist Jean-Luc Margot, the astrobiologists Julia DeMarines and Jacob Haqq-Misra, and the computational social scientist Anamaria Berea—submitted nine papers on a wide variety of SETI topics. Wright was lead author on four of them. One, which argued that SETI needed a trained workforce capable of attacking the problem from all sides, was co-signed by 126 astrophysicists.
“If the [Decadal] tells NASA, ‘This is something you should fund,’ then NASA has to fund it,” Wright told me. Such resources would be transformative. “If you don’t have federal money to support students, you don’t formalize the knowledge. You don’t have a curriculum,” he said. Right now, “everyone that works on [SETI] is a hobbyist.”
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Neither governmental backing nor scholarly approval, of course, can change SETI’s incalculably small odds of success. The conceptual limitations that have dogged it in the past may be an insurmountable product of the fact that we are the particular species we happen to be. Linda Billings, a communications researcher specializing in the rhetoric employed by scientists and proponents of space exploration, worked as a consultant on SETI-related projects for NASA from 1988 to 1992. In her view, they have often been reluctant to address the fundamental question of whether human technology is likely to bear a resemblance to technology developed elsewhere. A SETI skeptic, Billings told me that “the scientific rationale the SETI community offers is not sound—it depends on a growing pile of assumptions.” Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University, in Toronto, who studies the social and ethical aspects of space, is similarly doubtful about whether human researchers can anticipate how aliens would use technology. Still, she said, “I think the more nuanced thinkers on the SETI front are leaving behind the question of alien motivations and alien sociology as much as they can, and just thinking in terms of astrophysical signatures and the capabilities of their instruments.” She told me that SETI has stimulated new developments in astronomy and instrumentation. And many people argue that the extraordinary significance of an actual detection might make the modest amounts set aside for SETI seem reasonable, despite the inherent uncertainty of the research. (The ten-year, $100 million allocation that was considered in the early nineties equates to roughly four cents per person per year.)
On a sunny afternoon a few weeks after the SETI Institute’s awards ceremony, I met Wright on the Caltech campus, in Pasadena. He was attending a technosignatures workshop, which included experts in machine learning, sociology, dolphin communication, planetary science, and astrophysics. It was the meeting’s final day, and the attendees were dividing up the work of writing its final report, claiming sections (“Recognizing and Minimizing Human Biases”; “Lessons from Computational Biology”; “Probes and Relics in the Solar System”) for themselves. Earlier, they had pored over a textbook of ancient, untranslated human languages.
On a bench outside the ultramodern Keck Institute for Space Studies, Wright told me about his favorite sci-fi television show (the space opera Babylon 5) and the novels of Arthur C. Clarke (“His aliens are really alien”). He walked me through his plans for a new SETI center at Penn State, for which he’d secured $3.5 million in pledged funding. The center, Wright hopes, will be an academic home for the discipline, removed from the whims of the federal budget and private philanthropists, where students can be trained in the latest research. To date, he said, only seven doctoral candidates had ever completed a PhD in SETI subjects. Now at least five more astronomers—from Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, and Penn State—are scheduled to receive one.
In his book Cosmos, from 1980, the astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan offered a spiritual vision of contact with extraterrestrials. An epistle from space, written by an older and wiser society, could be detected by our radio telescopes; the aliens might then invite us to join a galactic federation of enlightened peers who communicate in a universal tongue. Sagan thought that translating such a message would be straightforward: “We will share scientific and mathematical insights with any other civilization,” he predicted. Wright, by contrast, wonders if humanity’s mathematical practices, such as our attachment to prime numbers, might prove to be idiosyncratic. The Caltech workshop had often focused on these sorts of “anthropic” assumptions. No one knows whether, if aliens exist, it will be possible to cross the conceptual gulfs dividing our minds from theirs. The universe may turn out to be more creative than our fantasies. Or it may be, as Wright hopes, that a more structured process of imagination can be a means of transcending our limited ideas.
“We’re looking for technology like our own, and so we presume the engineers of that technology will share our principles,” he said. “We’re looking for kindred spirits that will find interesting what we’ve found interesting.” Contemplating this problem, he regarded the Caltech campus from beneath the shade of a tree.
DEANNA CSOMO MCCOOL
Total Eclipse
from Aeon
Please note: this essay deals explicitly with suicide and may be distressing to some readers.
I stood at Anna’s bedside, marveling over her porcelain complexion, thick blond hair, and eyelashes so long they’d be the envy of a Maybelline model. The bleached white sheet tucked under her chin covered all but her left hand, which peeked out from underneath.
My seventeen-year-old daughter would cringe and bat my arms away whenever I’d attempt to smooth her hair, which cascaded down her back like a sunlit waterfall until she had it bobbed to her shoulders at age nine, and chopped into a pixie cut at fifteen. Tentatively I reached out to feel it, sweeping every strand from her forehead so I could soak in the tiniest details of her face. Anna, the type of child who would argue that the sky wasn’t technically blue, had rarely appeared this calm.
Looking down upon her, I remembered the time she twirled and giggled while jumping to catch fireflies. I remembered how she begged for a puppy and a horse and a younger sibling. For a golden flute. For vanilla ice cream. How she loved birds, and enjoyed trekking through the woods behind our northern Indiana home, notebook clutched in her hand. But I also remembered how her brows seemed permanently furrowed, frozen in a state of unrelenting irritability. I thought about the time, ten years ago, when Anna stood in the emergency room hallway and screamed that her two-year-old sister was faking a febrile seizure. I recalled the moments three years earlier, when her barrage of complaints tainted our family trip to Disney World, the self-proclaimed happiest place on Earth.
Allowed to stroke her hair again, I also thought about her fiery rages, the dark moods that cloaked her adolescence, and the twelve years I spent searching for answers that would ease both. Because of issues ranging from the difficulties in diagnosing children with mental health disorders to a dearth of clinicians and therapy options in some parts of the country, compounded by adolescents’ reluctan
ce to follow treatment plans, I had been stuck with the question, just like many other parents: Will my child ever get better?
* * *
A belt buckle cracked against the outside of the bathroom door, punctuated only by Anna’s wailing. “I hate you!” Anna, then six, screeched during one oppressively hot summer day in 2007. “I wish you would die! I want to die! I’m going to kill myself!”
Drenched in sweat, I cowered on the other side of the door, huddling with my eighteen-month-old, who clung to her green security blanket. My phone was perched on top of the toilet seat, and I couldn’t decide whether to call the police, yet again.
The daily rages over anything—or nothing—erupted quickly and lasted for hours. In between, she was constantly irritable. I spent my days feeling like I was carrying TNT, not knowing when a spark would ignite an explosion. The spark could be a smell. The word “no.” A neutral glance. Within twenty seconds, my daughter would transform, behaving like a swarm of bees chasing someone into a pond—not letting up until the victim nearly drowned.
The behavior started in kindergarten, and occurred at home, at school, and on weekends. I dutifully drove her to appointments with a therapist and a psychiatrist, who characterized the behavior as a symptom of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) combined with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), a behavioral issue some experts contend could stem from permissive parenting or a past riddled with either abuse or neglect. But I wasn’t permissive. Anna had never been abused or neglected. Like many seeking answers, I hit the books and kept a notebook about her extreme rages. When I asked Anna’s first psychiatrist about her extreme tantrums and outbursts, his warm brown eyes couldn’t mask his dismissive body language and cautious remarks that her behavior was likely just an extreme case of ODD. He offered an antipsychotic medication, Zyprexa, to her drug cocktail. But the medication didn’t work; the symptoms continued, and Anna’s diagnosis remained ADHD and ODD for years.
Our family had become caught in a cycle of issues formed when an unclear diagnosis leads to improper or delayed treatment. Psychologists and psychiatrists point to several reasons for this widespread issue, from the skill and training of the clinician, to the limitations of the way that diagnoses are made, to multiple disorders that exhibit themselves in the same child.
“We also don’t have genetic markers yet for any of these illnesses; we don’t have blood tests, so a lot of the diagnosis is based on observation and interviews,” said Jill Emanuele, a psychologist in New York and senior director of the mood disorders center at the Child Mind Institute. “The other challenge in diagnosing children is that they change really fast, so the presentations of their illness can change pretty quickly.” A child brought in to a psychologist at age six with symptoms of inattention or hyperactivity might be diagnosed with ADHD, but the same symptoms might lead to a diagnosis of depression in a thirteen-year-old.
After Anna’s psychiatrist retired, another child psychiatrist in our area, whose office hours were limited to one day a week, began seeing her. I continued writing in a behavior diary:
10-23-2010: Anna yelled for a half an hour and didn’t want to go to her room. Finally got her in her room but she began hitting her arm against her bunk bed. She finally quieted down so I went in to tell her the time-out was over. She was trying to choke herself with her belt.
9-22-2011: Anna came home from school and I reminded her to study for her spelling test. She refused, so I told her she would lose computer privileges. I bent down to unplug the laptop and she punched me in the chest. I pretended it didn’t hurt because that would make her angrier, but I called the police and drove myself to the doctor.
She had broken my sternum. After a nine-day stint in a mental-health facility, she received new medications, but I received no new answers. Those were still percolating 600 miles away in Bethesda, Maryland, where the psychiatrist Ellen Leibenluft, chief of the Section on Mood Dysregulation and Neuroscience with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), had been researching the problem of severely irritable children for years, and had a possible diagnostic answer for Anna’s struggles: disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, or DMDD.
* * *
Leibenluft served on the team that recommended DMDD be added to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-V) in 2013. The DSM is the periodically updated handbook used around the world to help professionals diagnose mental illnesses. Children diagnosed with DMDD must meet several criteria: chronic irritability, severe and frequent temper outbursts—more than three times a week—that are disproportionate to their age and situation, and problems functioning in more than one setting. Symptoms, lasting a year or more, must have appeared before age ten.
Each symptom precisely described Anna.
The relatively rare mood disorder, according to a 2018 article in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, has a prevalence of only about 1 percent of the population; even among those at risk for other mood disorders, it appears only 3 percent of the time. It was added to DSM-V to decrease the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder and subsequently prescribed powerful medications for it, including the Zyprexa that Anna once took. Some researchers and psychiatrists were concerned about whether DMDD, occurring alongside other disorders in up to 90 percent of cases, is a distinct disorder, or simply a collection of symptoms from other mood or behavioral disorders. But the inclusion of DMDD in the DSM-V opened the door for several new studies and clinical trials.
“These kids have a level of irritability and explosivity that’s a major functional impairment,” said David Rettew, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Vermont Medical Center. “They’re not safe. They’re in families where siblings are afraid of these kids; where parents are afraid of setting them off.”
Leibenluft and her team traced the dysfunction to the brain in a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2016. There, researchers exposed healthy children, children with bipolar disorder, and children with DMDD to happy, fearful, and angry faces of varying emotional intensity, measuring reaction in the amygdala, the emotion-processing part of the brain, via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Notably, all the children were able to label the emotion on each face, but the similarity ended there. The real insight came when comparing children with DMDD with those with bipolar disorder. The children with bipolar disorder showed hyperactivation of the amygdala only in the presence of fearful faces. But the children with DMDD showed hyperactivation—indicating an increase in irritability—across all types of faces, and at every intensity. DMDD was indeed a unique diagnosis, with its own pattern of dysfunction in the brain—and this evidence could be used to double-down, allowing scientists to design new studies for learning still more about this newly recognized psychiatric disease.
I had asked Anna’s psychiatrist about DMDD, and he quickly agreed that the mood disorder was most likely her proper diagnosis. When Anna became disillusioned with the talk-therapy portion of her treatment, and I learned in late 2016 about an NIMH study to evaluate children’s irritability over time using novel techniques, he encouraged her to participate. Initially, Anna was excited to join the study, saying she wanted to “advance science.” Though her tantrums had subsided, depression took the place of rage when she was fifteen, and a stay in a mental health hospital a few months earlier had done little to help. Her grades had slipped. She stopped caring about her appearance, and sunk into online-only friendships. She had felt better during the previous two years, so the depression took us by surprise. Her experience, however, was typical for the disorder—as studies revealed only in recent years. Research has shown that children diagnosed with DMDD often develop severe depression and anxiety as adolescents, even as their tantrums subside.
After several rounds of prescreening phone calls in late 2016, Anna and I were invited to the NIMH campus in February 2017 for the one-day evaluation to dete
rmine her eligibility. But by the time we were scheduled to depart for our trip, Anna’s mood had sunk even lower, and she ultimately refused to be in the study. She continued to take her medication, but would lie to her psychiatrist about how well it was working. “I hate the world; I hate people,” she told me. “I don’t want to help anybody. We all just die in the end, anyway. We do a bunch of work, become wage slaves, and die . . . what’s the point?”
When Anna was a young child, I could compel her to take her medication and try new ones, or even visit different clinicians. As a teenager, she would still talk with me about some aspects of her mental health, but any suggestion to return to the mental health center was met with anger and threats of suicide. The psychiatrist Kenneth Towbin, chief of clinical child and adolescent psychiatry in the Emotion and Development Branch of the NIMH, suggested that it’s common for adolescents to eschew care, whether for mental illness or juvenile diabetes or other chronic medical illnesses. “There are a host of reasons that have to do with the developmental period, features of the disorders themselves, family environment, community culture—peer and neighborhood culture—and societal stigma,” Towbin wrote to me. And change is difficult, even in adults, Emanuele noted, so trying to change an adolescent’s mind is even more challenging.
